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[WxTech]

Using Green Hell as a guide, here's Port Moresby, not quite finished on the texturing. The runways which have no parking aprons--which are the majority--have had their taxiways removed, as seen here for 3-mile strip. The concrete horrors will be made either PSP or dirt.

[WxTech]

The expanse of grassland on an old volcano's outflow apron. Some more tweaking is required to disguise repeating texture patterns.

[genXgamer]

As you can probably tell I'm extremely interested in the progress of this map, expect constant feedback.

Really happy with how Port Moresby is coming along, boy Seven and Five Mile airstrips what a joke!
Can't really see the town itself, can you find a better texture than the horrific/hideous grey stock ones used on so many maps?

If this map is indeed 1942-ish then Port Moresby will be the main player, followed by Milne Bay and Buna.
Unfortunately Lae isn't on the map (just worked this out) which is a real oversight and shame.

Any chance of incorporating muddy river banks you once posted about for the Green Hell map?
You can also re-use the mud texture for Gurney's airstrip.

To my knowledge this is the earliest and best picture of Gurney airstrip.

[WxTech]

I do have a texture slot reserved for river treatment where gravel and silt beds of reasonable width and extent can be represented. Due to the size of the individual lozenge patch occupied by a texture element we cannot get down to rather small scale modeling here, reserving this approach for just the more prominent cases.

At the moment I'm using the town textures from the vp retexture of this map. When the final refinements get underway there will be a better integrating into the scenery.

[RABIZO]

I am always amazed by the great suggestions.

I would expect "a few planes to land safely" on the "Glenn map".
And you also need runway distance.

What worries me is that the drawing is wonderful, so I'm worried that it will require a powerful PC.

[genXgamer]

No need to worry RABIZO.

Glenn is only swapping existing textures with new more appropriate ones (perhaps 512 with 1024 ones).
He is actually reducing the build up on the map, Port Moresby town and airfields around the map are having static objects removed.
Nothing has changed with runways other than their appearance, the runway and taxi points will remain the same.

[RABIZO]

Thank you genXgamer.
Your words made me feel at ease.

I often fly over New Guinea for video production.

[WxTech]

The stock map didn't use all texture slots, but I'm now filling them all. Like the vp repaint, my textures are all 1024 pixels. I will make no bumpH textures, which for weaker computers is a bit of a help on frame rates. And I have no plans to make _tree textures that specify where to place the auto generated trees; another aid for less strong hardware.

I've not done any kind of comparison but I do wonder if the number of unique textures displayed at once might impact frame rates. For instance, it surely must be smoother to fly over a landscape where just one texture fills everything as opposed to the landscape being filled with a number of different textures. The stock maps, even if a decent enough variety of textures are used, tend to full huge areas with a single texture, often resulting in a not large number of different textures being drawn.

Where not forest covered, I'll be mixing a number of textures on a small scale so as to obtain an organic variegation, and to disguise repetitive tiling artifacts, of course.

In any event, my aim is visual attractiveness with as low a frame rate hit as possible.

On a side note, for my Green Hell map (latest iteration, which has the 1944 extension) I have disabled all bumpH and _tree textures, which definitely helps with frame rates for my 2019 era computer  (i5 with RTX 2060). But for really object intensive areas--the Port Moresby airfield complex especially!--frame rates are disappointingly awful. I may at some point go on an object weeding-out mission!

Knowing that the omission of bridges renders this map inapplicable for DGen campaigns, would it be worthwhile to scrap the stock objects, or at least some of them, and place more sensible ones? Or is this inadvisable due to any single missions or static campaigns having existing objects as targets?

[RABIZO]

I'm looking forward to seeing this map come to fruition.

Speaking of luxury, I'd like to combine it with version 1.6.

[WxTech]

After looking over Google Earth to identify rivers having reasonably prominent gravel/silt beds, I added this texture where appropriate.

[WxTech]

Here's a patchwork of portions of all 24 textures I'm currently using, placed near a flat corner of the map, in the middle of the forest, as a visual aid during the building process. The order from upper L to lower R is the order as listed in the load.ini, from LowLand0 to AirField3. A couple or few textures might be further tweaked. Most are from the Green Hell map, and the 3 village/city/factory textures are from vpmedia; these last 3 will certainly be worked on at least somewhat, if not replaced.

I also got rid of the vast majority of the villages dotting the coast, leaving in place those having a name in the labels file, and a few others. Incidentally, after trimming down Port Moresby and erasing those numerous villages (all of which had a number of palm trees present), and eliminating most taxiways, the actors.static has gone from 271KB down to 102KB.

[WxTech]

I just did my most extensive airstrip fiddling ever. For Jackson airdrome, having the single concrete runway and concrete taxiways and aprons, I removed all concrete and put down a single-width run of PSP planking (as opposed to the triple width of the concrete), and laid down blank plates on just about the entire remainder of the field--not just under the routes the AI planes would be taxying/parking. This was facilitated by a quite large airfield plate in the object list; a few of these cover what the older parking plates would require a hundred or more to do.

I also did some tweaking of the taxi and parking points, based on a tutorial I read through shortly before jumping in to this stage of things.

On to Wards field next, where the two concrete runways will be replaced with PSP and dirt. Then to add blank plates to all strips that have had their taxiways removed.